In recent years, the number of people using portable terminals has rapidly increased and portable terminals serve as an essential tool for modern life. Portable terminals have been developed to provide services for transmitting various types of data, a variety of additional services, and so forth, as well as a voice call service, and thus serve as multimedia communication devices.
Portable terminals generally provide a phonebook function. Portable terminal users can store other parties' names and phone numbers in the phonebook of the portable terminals, and search for a phone number there from using various types of keywords, such as the other party's name or part of the name, or a portion of the digits composing a phone number, and the like. With the development of portable terminals, the phonebook function has been further enhanced to save addresses, email addresses, photographs, personal information, and so forth, of the other parties, as well as phone numbers.
The caller ID display service is commonly used among portable terminal users. If a called portable terminal receives a call with a phone number stored therein from a caller portable terminal, it displays the caller ID on the display so that the called party can recognize the caller. If the caller transmits a call with a phone number that differs from his/her previous phone number to the called party, the called portable terminal receives the call with the changed phone number. Since the called party does not have the changed phone number of the caller, the called party needs to store the changed phone number in the phonebook. To this end, the called party must search for the caller's name from the phonebook, delete the caller's existing phone number therefrom, and store the caller's changed phone number therein. In particular, if a plurality of phone numbers stored in the phonebook need to be changed, the portable terminal user must perform the procedures described above with respect to each phone number, which inconveniences the user. Meanwhile, if the user does not change and store a phone number, the phone number is never updated in the portable terminal.
Therefore, a method is required to automatically update a phonebook, although the portable terminal user does not directly change and store the phone numbers in the portable terminal.